CNET News reports that Salesforce.com has released its new social media-based collaboration product, which has been in beta testing since February. The new Chatter product is described as a “sort of Facebook for business” by Salesforce.com and is meant to compete with business collaboration offering such as IBM’s Lotus Notes and Microsoft’s SharePoint.
Chatter lets people follow the update of co-workers along with tracking individual business documents and pieces of data. For example, a sales rep could follow the details of a pending new client contract or a customer support manager could track a bug report until a solution is found. Information shared on Chatter will remain safe because it runs behind a firewall, protecting it from people outside of the company.
“We feel very excited that we have a killer app on our hands with Chatter,” said Salesforce.com Senior Vice President Kraig Swensrud. “Facebook has really trained the entire Internet on how to collaborate. No one has to go to a training class to figure out how to use Chatter.”